Lessons fighting a lethal enemy

Singapore Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong was right to be cautious about his country’s achievements in battling coronavirus. “It is not that the tide has turned, it is that we put the dykes up,” he told our newspaper on Monday. But with good news about the global fight against the contagion in short supply and an alarming 800 people having died on a single day in Italy (more than on any one day at its peak in China), there is no doubt Singapore’s relative success and that of other states in our region carry lessons for all desperately seeking ways to turn back the tide. As an Asian business and transit hub with close links to China, Singapore, with 5.6 million people, might have been expected to provide fertile ground for the virus’s rapid spread. Singapore is one of the world’s most densely populated cities. Yet by being quick off the mark and launching aggressive action to contain the outbreak, it has had only 455 cases, with two deaths.

Singapore is not alone in being what Mr Lee terms “reasonably successful”. Taiwan, its population at 24 million similar to Australia’s, has Beijing breathing down its neck. It is only 180km from the Chinese mainland. There is intense traffic across the Strait of Taiwan. Yet it has had only 169 cases with two deaths. Hong Kong’s population of 7.4 million, living cheek by jowl alongside China, has had 317 cases with four deaths. South Korea, too, offers a positive perspective amid the gloom: with a population of 52 million and almost 9000 cases, it has had remarkable success in keeping deaths down to just over 100. Mr Lee attributed Singapore’s success to the unrelenting “checking out all people any infected person may have unwittingly infected”. Technology including CCTV has been used to “contact-trace” several thousand potential carriers, while aggressive action from the start, with clear public messaging and extensive testing, has been highly effective in ensuring early detection and isolation of carriers. Hong Kong has followed Singapore’s strategy, while Taiwan and South Korea have pursued a course of mass testing (as of March 19, South Korea had conducted more than 307,000 tests, the highest in the world), followed by rigorous “contact tracing” and the immediate quarantining of the carrier’s contacts. In all four jurisdictions, strict rules imposing social distancing have been unrelentingly applied.

Governments confront different circumstances. But the contrast between the relative success of the Asian states and the catastrophe in Italy, where so far there have been 5476 deaths out of 59,138 cases, could not be greater. Italian writer Mattia Ferrarasi puts his country’s tragic plight down to delays and inaction; it took weeks after the virus first appeared before there was the realisation severe measures were unavoidable. Countries are paying a terrible price for that failure to act early to get ahead of COVID-19’s trajectory and strictly enforce measures to meet the greatest challenge of our times.